Censorship
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For Holy Week, Philippines Censor Board Makes Sure Buses Show “Wholesome” Movies
In the Philippines, Holy Week (the period between the last day of Lent and Easter Sunday) is a big deal, as you’d expect from the third largest Catholic country in the world. Part of Holy Week involves a mass exodus from capital Manila to smaller villages as residents go to be with their families, creating major logistical headaches on the traffic front. As part of gearing-up efforts, inspections of the bus stations began yesterday. 594 buses were granted special permits to drive outside of their normal routes, part of a larger array of regulatory measures. Separately, the country’s censor board […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 15, 2014 -
The NC-17 Rating Needs to Be Abolished (We Should Know, We Made an NC-17 Movie.)
We are the writers and executive producers of Lucky Bastard, which Robert directed, a “found footage” thriller about a porn shoot gone horribly wrong. While not featuring actual sex, Lucky Bastard has nudity, strong language, sexual situations and disturbing violence. Concerned about our film’s intense content, we submitted it for an MPAA rating. We accepted “NC-17 for explicit sexual content” because, in all honesty, it is the correct rating. Nonetheless, the NC-17 rating is fundamentally flawed and needs to be abolished. NC-17 is a charade, for all intents and purposes dying on the vine. It is a deterrent to ensure […]
by Lukas Kendall and Robert Nathan on Jan 29, 2014 -
The Censors: Short-Haired Women and Long-Haired Men (and a Note on Hegemony)
This third installment of Time Frames draws on The Media History Digital Library, a reservoir of information about early cinema that includes the sorts of magazines, journals, and trade publications that, in the pre-digital era, had only been available to those able to travel to research libraries. At over 800,000 scanned pages and growing, the collection is daunting. In Time Frames I’ll cull through and select a series of images and text from the collection to highlight key transformative moments in the film culture and industry, as well as other oddities and obscure artifacts. Note: click on images to enlarge. Prior to the publication of the […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Oct 7, 2013 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/20/11
Here are a few things in my Instapaper this week. In GQ, Mark Harris looks back at “The Day the Movies Died” and the preeminence of easy marketing over original ideas. An excerpt: Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. YouTube has […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2011
